Photos look awful in Photoshop & Bridge but fine in all other programs; how can i fix this?

Question

I just got a new windows 7 64-bit laptop (Sony Vaio vpcf226fm/b) and installed photoshop cs5 extended on it and began to look through some of my photos with Bridge and notied that they were all very washed out and desaturated.  In addition, certain parts of some of the pictures were very low-resolution...I'm not exactly sure how to describe it, but darker parts of the photos would have the same sort of effect you get when saving an gif image at very low quality.  Id take a screenshot but unfortunately am not at home right now.  Anyway, I thought the laptop might be messed up but the same pictures look fine when viewed in any other program...its just photoshop and bridge that they appear so poorly in.  I messed around with the color settings but couldn't make much progress...finally the only thing that I found to work was, with an image open, to go to View - Proof Colors and that would make the photo appear the same as in the rest of the programs, without the washed out/desaturated look and without the lo-resolution areas.  I can't find a way to make that stick, though, or a way to apply it to Bridge.
So what can I do?  And what's likely to be causing this in the first place?

Answer 1

Alright, I'm back home now.
Here's what I mean about the major difference in saturation...the top photo is a screenshot from Canon's Zoombrowser software and the bottom photo is a screenshot of the same photo in Adobe Bridge CS5:
As you can see, there's also a greyish/bluish tint when viewed with Photoshop/Bridge as well.
And here's what I mean about parts of some of the photos being very low-resolution...you can see it especially well in this underexposed photo (the lower left and right corners and the edges of the clouds), again Zoombrowser on top and Bridge on the bottom:
What are your Edit > Color Settings? (A screenshot might be more convenient than typing it up.)
Have the images been saved with the ICC-Profiles embedded or not?
Here's a screenshot of the color settings:
Also, the images haven't been saved by anything else before, they're straight off the camera, unedited.
How have you calibrated your display? And have you changed your display controls since it was calibrated?
Basically, this is a symptom of your display profile not matching your display, and it'll only affect color managed applications that rely on the display profile.
I haven't calibrated the display and wasn't really planning to since it's a laptop and is going to be used mainly for photo and video viewing rather than editing; my desktop is what I do almost all my editing work with, but since this laptop is new and much faster I was planning on using it to sort through and organize all my hundreds of thousands of photos, then transfer that selection to my desktop for post-processing.  However, it's still important that I have a fairly accurate display on the laptop since I don't want to delete something that looks bad if it turns out that it only looked bad because of the laptop's display.
I put the new laptop next to my desktop's monitor and then borrowed two other laptops and put those on the same table too and had all four computers display the same image; the laptop was clearly the odd one out both when viewing the image in Photoshop as well as when viewing it in Zoombrowser.  In Zoombrowser it was far more bright and saturated than the other 3 displays and in Photoshop it was far less saturated than the other 3, plus it had low-resolution areas like in the second screenshot whereas the other 3 did not...so I'm not sure what to do now.  The non-color managed photos are apparently being displayed inaccurately by being overly bright and saturated and the color-managed photos are being displayed inaccurately  by being too desaturated plus having lo-res areas.  Any help?